Book Review: The Gifts of the Jews

Book Review
"The Gifts of the Jews"
How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels
by: Thomas Cahill
ISBN 0-385-48249-3
Paperback, $14.95
Nan A. Talese/Anchor Books


I bought a copy of "The Gifts of the Jews" because a professor highly recommended it as a moving tribute to the Jewish people. Based on who recommended the book, I expected the book to be respectful of the Biblical record, but I soon found that it wasn't what I expected.

Cahill opens the book with a graphic verbal depiction of the nature of worship and the attitude towards gods in the people and culture in the Fertile Crescent prior to Abram's arrival on the scene. He does a good job of comparing various early literature to discern the difference between various forms of belief, and attitudes toward local deities at the time. He spends more time than I thought was warranted giving a graphic description of the sensual worship rituals of the ziggurats with their priestesses - making his book seem more like a paperback romance than a respectable work of historical research.

As you can tell by now, I was not overly ecstatic about Cahill's presentation of the roots of the Hebrew people. However, what I did appreciate was the credence he gave to the idea of Abraham's belief in his personal covenant God. The "evolution" of the belief in a god that Cahill outlines is a decent perspective to read, in order to understand how Abraham's neighbors would have viewed his insistence on belief in a personal Creator God.

At times, you would almost believe that Cahill was a believer. He seems at times, to have great respect for God. However, he shows no great appreciation for the Biblical record, and thereby blows his "cover" in my mind. This man is no believer. He honors his own intellect above any idea of God.

Cahill lost all credibility with me when he said:

It is no longer possible to believe that every word of the Bible was inspired by God. Fundamentalists still do, but they keep usp such self-delusion only by scrupulously avoiding all forms of scientific inquiry. They must also maintain a tight reign on their own senses, for, even without access to modern biblical criticism, any reader might wonder at the patchwork nature of the scriptures, their conflicting norms and judgements, outright contradictions, and bald errors. But even without resorting to modern scientific methodology or noticing what an inconsistent palimpsest the Hebrew Bible can be, we must reject certain parts of the Bible as unworthy of a God we would be willing to believe in.

When you strip away the camoflague, you see that Thomas Cahill, not God, is the final arbiter. God must be judged by the almight Thomas Cahill. The phrase "a God we would be willing to believe in" implies that we are the final judge of all that is right or wrong.

If God is God, then I do not have the right to set standards for Him. I cannot set a certain standard for God and only believe in Him if He performs to a level that meets my satisfaction! If I am the final judge...then I am God. If I am God, then I can cease my search for Him. I have already found him in the mirror!

While Mr. Cahill is a masterful writer, I cannot recommend this book for anyone who truly desires to honor God, or the Biblical record of His work among His people. I can only recommend it to anyone who seeks to have more fuel to fire their belief in "the almighty in the mirror."

All others....move along...there's noting to see here.

Book Review: DEATH by Meeting

I have decided to try to do a review of the books I read, so you can get a preview of some of the things I read. I hope you find this useful. I will start with a book I just finished, and in a couple of days, I will do a review of a book I finished about a week ago. "DEATH by Meeting", I really enjoyed and think it will be a very useful book to anyone who has to run meetings in their work. The next book I review will be one I loved to hate for most of my reading of it. :-)

"DEATH by Meeting" is by Patrick Lencioni, and is written in the form of a "fable" to teach a new concept. For that reason, it is actually a pretty light read. If you are one who skips to the end to decide if they will like the book or not, you will get a complete misconception, since Lencioni recaps some of the key concepts taught by the fable in a couple of chapters at the end.

I won't steal any thunder from the book by telling any more details that to say that Lencioni advocates through the story, the idea of doing your meeting "on purpose". Don't expect one kind of meeting to be a "one-size-fits-all" affair. Conflict, drama and context are your friends in getting vital information onto the table in your meetings.

Lencioni's protagonist in the fable gets the executives to understand that the first 10 minutes of any meeting, like in a movie, will set the stage for the rest of the movie, and will probably determine whether people are engaged or bored by the rest of the piece. Meetings are no different.

The idea of doing meetings in varied ways to match the topic and purpose should NOT be news to any of us, but the fact is that in MOST organizations, a meeting is a meeting is a meeting. They are all the same and most of the participants would give their left arm to have an acceptable excuse to miss the meeting. Lencioni crafts a wonderful story to help executives grapple with some concepts that will help protect their organization from "DEATH by Meeting". I would encourage anyone who needs to run meetings in their role in their organization to read this book and implement as much as possible. It is a good read and makes some excellent points!

As a final point, I would say that my wife commented on the speed with which I finished this book... I usually plod carefully through non-fiction to make sure I get the point. Since Lencioni wrote this like a well-lubed work of fiction, I flew through it and couldn't get enough! :-)

Kinship Project

I just finished a kinship project for my Anthropology class. I was to chart my family back at least to my great granparents. Since genealogy is a hobby of mine, it wasn't so much work to come up with the data to work with. The hard part was working within the space constraints that I was allowed. I had to fit the whole chart on a single 81/2 X 11 sheet of paper.

Now...for the clincher. I had never counted the number of my first cousins before. When I finished the chart, I counted the cousins and came up with 53! That is just my 1st Cousins! No wonder it was so hard to fit them all on the page.

Is 53 cousins a lot of cousins? How many do you have?

What should church look like?

WOW! I just finished reading something for my Cultural Anthropology class that was a wakeup call! I have been baffled for some time about the issues facing "small churches" as I have been a part of MANY small churches and the only thing that changes seems to be the nametags! :-9 The issues seem to transfer from country to country, denomination to denomination, and only the actors playing the different roles change.

Today I was reading Charles Kraft and some words lept off the page at me! Here is what he said:

When large extended families are a major part of the local society, as in many parts of Latin America and elsewhere, any given church may appropriately be made up largely of a single family. In rural United States, we often have churches comprised of associations of families. In urban areas, where our associations tend to be more of individuals or nuclear families, our churches reflect this. This is right and good, for there is not a single pattern for churches in all parts of the world. God uses whatever the culturally appropriate practices of groupness may be to provide the social basis for His local churches. This is the point of the so-called homogeneous unit principle that has been a part of church growth theory from the start

What do you think? I KNOW I should have seen this AGES ago, but I guess when you live in the forest, you don't pay much attention to trees. I grew up in a church that is basically an association of families. We always denied it because we thought it was bad. But maybe it is OK?
The bigger issue is that the population growth in this traditionally rural, farming area tends to be people from a more urban perspective, running from the ills of the urban society they came from, for the "peace and safety" of rural life. Is it possible for this rural church to have an influence in the development of another church more appropriate to the urbanites who are moving into the area? Or does it have to be a whole new organism...grown from scratch?